Title
Supporting argumentation in online political debate: Evidence from an experiment of collective deliberation.
Abstract
In this article, we report the results of an e-democracy experiment in which a group of supporters of a large political party were asked to debate online about ways to reform the electoral law. We compare a traditional forum with an online collaborative argumentation platform to capture the various proposals and their associated pros and cons. The aim of this study is to assess the capability of this tool to support online collective deliberation in a real-world case, as compared to an online discussion supported by a forum. By comparing users' experience across several metrics related to usability, activity levels, and quality of collaboration, our findings show that the forum produced more activity and ideas and its users perceived a better quality of the collaboration process, while the argumentation tool helped to reduce the amount of self-referential arguments and encourage viewing and rating of others' posts.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1177/1461444817691509
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY
Keywords
Field
DocType
Argumentation,co-creation,collective intelligence,deliberation,e-democracy,ideas crowdsourcing,online collaboration
Deliberation,Social psychology,Co-creation,Sociology,Collective intelligence,Usability,Argumentation theory,Online discussion,Politics,E-democracy
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
20
4
1461-4448
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
19
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Iandoli1608.13
Ivana Quinto2343.65
Paolo Spada300.34
Mark M. Klein41550187.52
Raffaele Calabretta58912.94